CAREER: Understanding Intelligent Morphology and Enhancing Bio-Inspired Design through System-Level Modeling of the Insect Flight Mechanism

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will focus on cultivating a deep understanding of the intelligent morphology of flying insects to guide better engineering designs for flying robots. Intelligent morphology is the concept that natural structures have evolved to reduce the energetic and neurological inputs required to control them. Insects are masterful at exploiting intelligent morphology, utilizing their body's flexibility to interact effortlessly with their environments. This enables them to perform complex tasks using a small fraction of the energy and cognitive power available to other animals. By contrast, many engineered systems continue to employ rigid components which relegate little function to passive mechanisms. This limits their energy efficiency, increases controller complexity and reduces their capacity to adapt to dynamic environments. Using the insect model, this project will generate methodologies that incorporate intelligent morphology design principles into engineered systems, which in turn can enhance their performance and durability. Concurrently, this award will support the training of future engineers in the fields of dynamics and vibrations through a state-of-the-art Applied Dynamics educational laboratory. The Applied Dynamics educational laboratory will also host annual week-long workshops focused on teaching the fundamentals of vibrations to rural middle school students who currently have limited access to science programs, as well as other students from underrepresented groups. Current research topics will be integrated into these educational activities. This program aims to develop a data driven system-level model of the insect flight mechanism that is comprised of the following components: the insect wing, abdomen, thorax, wing hinge and wing costal break. The project focuses on the latter three. Data collected from dynamical experiments on actual insects will drive component model formulation, and benchtop experimental systems representative of each component will be constructed in order to study biological phenomena in a controlled environment. Through this integrative approach of analytical modeling, biological testing and benchtop experimentation, this research will demonstrate how (1) the flexible insect thorax minimizes the energetic costs of locomotion, (2) the wing hinge simplifies flight control, and (3) wing buckling enhances insect collision robustness. Derived models will be reduced order to facilitate parametric studies and will account for complex phenomena associated with viscoelasticity and nonlinearity. Such models can easily be extended to inform bio-inspired technologies such as flapping wing micro air vehicles and flapping airfoil energy harvesters. This project contributes to the Principle Investigator’s long-term goal of elucidating the fundamental nature of intelligent morphology in complex biological systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.